What did you see at Interop? How about over 1,000 videos playing… at the same time!

I was at Interop last week where the IBTA issued a press release regarding the growth of InfiniBand in both the HPC and EDC markets (review analyst reports). While there, I had some time to walk the show floor and check out the latest developments and announcements from a multitude of exhibitors.

I’m still pondering my take on Interop this year… it’s been a while since I’ve seen so many abandoned spaces on the show floor. Mind you - most were 10×10 or 10×20 spots - but you could tell there were others who went light on their presence. I saw one exhibitor that had a 40×40 booth and just filled it with banner stands. Yikes! So nothing was really grabbing at me - until I went to Fusion-io’s booth and saw the wall of monitors with 1,000 videos playing all at once.

FINALLY SOMETHING IMPRESSIVE!

Even more amazing, the videos were all being driven by a single PCIe card which had 1.2TB of SSD RAM on it. This one “ioSAN” card from Fusion-io completely saturated 16 servers (126 CPU cores). They were able to achieve this through the bandwidth performance and ultra low-latency of 20Gb/s InfiniBand. In fact, they told me the 20Gb/s InfiniBand connection would allow them to saturate even more servers, yet they only brought 16.

The ioSAN can be used as networked, server-attached storage or integrated into networked storage infrastructure, making fundamental changes to the enterprise storage area. This is a great example of how InfiniBand is the enabling technology for next-generation storage.